Ralph Shaw, "Anarchism Demystified"

October 16, 2010 - 1:52pm -- jim

Although the anarchists are unanimous in their detestation of
state-sponsored capitalism, they have divergent views on capitalism if
state sponsorship is removed. To the individualists, the evil is not
capitalism itself, rather it is the collusion between the state and
those who own capital.

Contrary to popular belief, anarchism as a set of ideas does not mean
chaos, nihilism, or social breakdown per se, but chaos and temporary
breakdown of social order can occur in pursuance of anarchist aims. The
same as a nihilist, an anarchist refuses to bow to authority, but unlike
a nihilist, he does not believe in destruction for the sake of
destruction — a position that results from the nihilist’s belief in the
nothingness of existence and valuelessness of all morality. Anarchists
would argue that their aims are noble and constructive rather than
destructive, that they want to bring about a society that is free from
chaos, war, violence and poverty and, most anarchists would, in fact,
eschew violence.

So what is anarchism? The fact is that anarchism, the same as socialism,
comes in so many flavours and variations that often contradict each
other that it is not easy to give it a straightforward definition. It
has been argued from such diametrically opposite positions as
individualism and communism — one advocating individual sovereignty and
the other social solidarity — that it does not seem like a consistent
theory. As David Miller puts it in his book, Anarchism (1983), more than
an ideology, anarchism looks like a jumble of beliefs without rhyme or
reason. However, Miller has done an excellent job demystifying anarchism
and some of his elucidations are summarised here.

Miller argues that there is a common thread running through variations
of anarchism by which the anarchists can be grouped together. Belief in
a stateless society is common to all types of anarchists. That the state
should be replaced by a new form of social organisation is a universal
creed held by anarchists of all shades. They see the state as a
punitive, coercive, exploitative, and destructive body that should be
replaced by functionally specific institutions and believe that the
institutions should be voluntary and not compulsory. Their main emphasis
is on privatisation of state institutions along functional lines.
According to the anarchists, each institution should have a clearly
defined role such as guiding production, consumption, and social order,
but none should be sovereign over the others. The anarchist institutions
should also be voluntary in the sense that all those who are to be
governed by a specific institution should voluntarily choose to do so.
To give people such choice, some theorists have suggested establishing
collective agencies that compete for people’s allegiances. To the
anarchist, collective institutions are preferable to state
bureaucracies, because such institutions would either be run by direct
democracy or through rotation of office.

Anarchists detest organised religion and economic systems such as
capitalism and socialism as much as they detest the state and have
spewed as much venom against organised religion and existing economic
systems as against the state. Same as their common hostility to the
state, their common dread of the church stems from their critique of the
principle of authority that entails that no person or institution can
ever have the right to issue orders others have to obey. The authority
of the priest over the believer is seen as the origin of all authority,
i.e. once a person has submitted to the authority of another in
spiritual matters, it becomes easier to induce him into subservience to
political leaders. The priest can use his authority to issue doctrines
of obedience to the political authorities, thus legitimising the state.
Even though most anarchists have been atheists, claiming that belief in
God is a response to social deprivations, their enemy is not religion as
such but organised religion, i.e. “churches that disseminate official
creeds whose content is hierarchically controlled”.

Although the anarchists are unanimous in their detestation of
state-sponsored capitalism, the prevalent mode of capitalism, they have
divergent views on capitalism if state sponsorship is removed. To the
individualists, the evil is not capitalism itself, rather it is the
collusion between the state and those who own capital. They believe if
this link is broken, the oppressive effects such as monopolies and
concentration of wealth would vanish. Consequently, wealth would be more
equally distributed. To the communist anarchists, however, private
ownership of property means inevitable concentration of wealth and
resources in a few hands. Hence capitalism of any shade is unacceptable
to them. The anarchists are equally opposed to state socialism. From the
anarchist point of view, a socialist state is a state nonetheless in
which a ruling class controls the rest of society. Even though the
capitalists and priests have been replaced by socialists and so-called
social scientists, coercion and exploitation continue. There is lack of
consensus on the kind of economic system the anarchists propose. The
alternatives they advance range from free market systems to systems of
communal ownership in which goods are produced by independent communes
and distributed on the basis of need. Even though the proposed
alternatives lack clarity on what exactly they should be, there is no
confusion in the anarchist’s thinking on what they ought not to be. The
anarchist economic systems cannot be centrally controlled. A
decentralised form composed of voluntary associations would be in
keeping with anarchist thinking and acceptable to them.

Even though most anarchists do not advocate violence, historically, a
small proportion has used terrorist methods to achieve their ends. They
have even tried to justify such acts, though unconvincingly, as either
acts of revenge and retribution, or on the grounds that the state cannot
be dissolved but through violence. Anarchist terrorism took place mostly
in the 1890s and the 1970s and only a tiny minority was involved, but it
was instrumental in affixing the image of an anarchist as a heinous
monster in the popular imagination.